The Wood for the Trees, Richard Fortey
The Wood for the Trees, Richard Fortey
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The Wood for the Trees
One Man's Long View of Nature

Author: Richard Fortey

Narrator: Michael Page

Unabridged: 10 hr 46 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 12/06/2016

Synopsis

A few years ago, award-winning scientist Richard Fortey purchased four acres of woodland in the Chiltern Hills of Oxfordshire, England. The Wood for the Trees is the joyful, lyrical portrait of what he found there.

With one chapter for each month, we move through the seasons: tree felling in January, moth hunting in June, finding golden mushrooms in September. Fortey, along with the occasional expert friend, investigates the forest top to bottom, discovering a new species and explaining the myriad connections that tie us to nature and nature to itself. His textured, evocative prose and gentle humor illuminate the epic story of a small forest. But he doesn't stop at mere observation. The Wood for the Trees uses the forest as a springboard back through time, full of rich and unexpected tales of the people, plants, and animals that once called the land home. With Fortey's help, we come to see a universe in miniature

About Richard Fortey

Richard Fortey was a senior paleontologist at the Natural History Museum in London. He was Collier Professor in the Public Understanding of Science and Technology at the Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of Bristol in 2002. In 2003, he won the Lewis Thomas Prize for Writing About Science from Rockefeller University. He has been a Fellow of the Royal Society since 1997 and was elected as a Fellow in the Royal Academy of Literature in 2009.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Mackay

What an interesting, gentle, fabulous book. It reads like a memoir, but it's a mélange of many things, include a few recipes and how-to ideas mixed in, about a little wood and all its denizens in the Chiltern Hills of England. Some history, some easily digested science, some poetic descriptions... I......more

Goodreads review by Irene

I don't know what whoever wrote the description for this book was thinking, but this was not what I was promised. This book felt... crusty, for lack of a better word. There were remarkably few sections about the woods, and even though I found them really interesting, they were unfortunately bookende......more

Goodreads review by Jean

Able to draw you from one intense and vivid description of beauty to the next. The Wood for the Trees is a title with two meanings. It refers to a saying, "Can't see the wood for the trees" which is defined by the Cambridge Dictionary as, "to be unable to understand a situation clearly because you ar......more

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